Silicon Valley Greek-Style

Modern co-working spaces are bringing together young entrepreneurs with innovative ideas on business and technology

“Capital is mobile but capitalists are lazy”. The preceding saying is the cornerstone of most start-ups and innovative businesses that are formed around a new way of utilizing digital technologies. Anyone who is feverishly working away, dreaming of becoming the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg (the founders of Apple and Facebook respectively), knows that investors tend to gather in areas where there is already a high degree of innovation. Programmers flock by the thousands to ‘innovation nuclei’ such as Silicon Valley, New York, London and, more recently, Tel-Aviv, for exactly the same reason that aspiring actors from all corners of the earth set off to Hollywood with the dream of being discovered. Recognizing the importance of physical (and not just digital) proximity to innovative cores, Greek entrepreneurs have created co-working spaces in Athens and Thessaloniki over the past year. In these spaces programmers, designers, economists and communication specialists work together, without necessarily knowing one another – sharing the same space and the same dream. Somehow, out of all this, the story of the miniature Greek-style Silicon Valley was born.